tell-tale hearts
by le chevalier de la lune
Summary: They are drowning by degrees. Seifer, Rinoa, and the succession of witches.
1. i

**i. **

This is not a love story.

He pins her down to the bed in the middle of the night, when her dreams send her writhing, screaming obscenities and rage at him in a voice that is not her own, speaking in hard-accented tongues, and her nails leave bloody streaks along her arms.

His fingers tighten around her wrists and he says her name, again again again, aloud and in silence, hoping that one way or another will cut through the universes colliding inside of her skull.

"Rin—" he says, and he is aware that his voice breaks on that half a syllable, aware that she is featherlight beneath his grip and that he will one day have to run her through with cold steel, because what is this, if it is not a knighting?

This is not a love story, and yet he would die a thousand times over for her. But he doesn't know if he can do it, kill her like he's always told Leonhart that he would never be capable of— _you're not strong enough. _

"Shh— Rin, I'm here, I'm _right here_—"

But he has walked this path before, shared thoughts and dreams and nightmares with a witch— _tick tick tick,_ the clock goes running down the hours, and with a sudden, sharp inhalation, Rinoa comes back to herself, gold leaking from her eyes and leaving them brown and soft as a doe's, and just as terrified.

Seifer gives it a moment before he withdraws, knees still planted on either side of her as he sits back on his heels, and waits to see if she is going to disappear on him again.


	2. ii

**ii.**

This is not a love story.

She's had that, before. She's had lazy winter mornings in bed, and swaying to wine-softened jazz on nights lit by fireflies. She's had the warm afterglow that followed her through the day and comforted her, calmed her, grounded her, until it could no longer break through the frost.

She's had promises, and she has learned that promises cannot be kept, and no amount of wanting or love can change that.

Waking takes longer now; the fight through smoke and ash and burning earth more desperate, the wisps and shadows that threaten to tear her apart more wholly formed. She comes back between worlds, where the room is not a room, the bed is not a bed, and she is not a girl, not anymore. Her eyes burn and she can feel the lines that sear her face in waves and spirals, and the worried breathing in front of her registers and she sees his shadow in the dark, shrouded in the flames of her subconscious.

This is not a love story. But as the flames die down and he comes into view fully before her, she collapses against his chest and feels the darkness pulsing under his skin, and every beat brings her back to something almost human.

Rinoa closes her eyes and feels her tears turn to steam against the brilliant veins that crawl towards her cheeks, and wonders when her dreams will smother her entirely.


	3. iii

**iii. **

He reaches across the breakfast table one day, six months and three days after they have started living together, a half-year of peace and war in the form of domesticity. Her chin is lifted up by forefinger and thumb, and a complaint is halfway out of her mouth as he tilts her face from side to side.

"What are you _doing_?" she demands, and amusement colors her tone until the expression in his eyes changes, brow furrowing as he moves her head.

"—Never mind," he says, and he knows he wasn't hallucinating it, the blue whorls shimmering at the edges of her eyes. But they are gone now, and he buries that fear in the last third of his second cup of coffee.

He should have said it aloud then.

Rinoa comes back to him, and her skin is fire beneath his lips— one day, he will do this and she will burn his mouth to ash. Seifer kisses her softly, gently, tracking those lines that don't abate now, just get buried under too much makeup and wearing her hair cut shaggily in front of her face, anything she can do to stave off the inevitable.

_I love you_, he thinks, and the darkness that hangs around her like a velvet cloak takes the words and swallows them.

"You're alright," he says aloud, and for this second, at the very least, it is true.

They have banned clocks that tick from their apartment as a rule, but he swears he hears it, a susurrus

tick

tick

tick

under her quiet weeping.


	4. iv

**iv. **

She can still feel joy, and sometimes that is enough.

She drags Seifer down the shoreline and laughs, head tossed back and skin glowing in the moonlight and slows where the waves weigh the hem of skirt and tickle her ankles. He comes to a hard stop behind her and slides his hands along her hips and spins her around to face him, and buries his face in her chest, her neck. He picks her up and Rinoa presses her lips against his and revels in the freedom of moonlight on her skin.

There are times she misses Squall to the point of physical pain, and she cries herself to sleep, angry with him, with herself, with the lie that love is all you need. When she isn't dreaming of Time and the rage of elements she will one day use to destroy the world as she knows it, she dreams of him; when it was good, and the endless months of silence as she fell deeper and deeper inside herself to a place he could not follow.

Now is not that time.

She insists on walking naked down the beach and it such a relief to not hear protests that she kisses Seifer again, and again, and when the sun rises on them they are too far down the beach to want to walk back, and take a cab: exhausted, covered in sand, and sore in places they'll be feeling for days.

Parts of her awaken, with him. Parts she carefully filed away and eventually dismissed as lost that creep out of the tar-black fear in smiles, in bursts of laughter, in light conversation over cups of coffee.

They collapse into bed still covered in sand, and Seifer falls asleep first. She lays against him, he even breathing tickling her forehead, and she traces patterns on his chest. His weathered skin feels paper-thin under her touch, so different from the arms that spun her around in the waves.

Now, she feels joy.

Now, she feels power.

She drums long nails over the space where his heart is and almost lets herself draw blood.


	5. v

**v. **

he dreams in blood-spatter, in gore that reads of once-people, in the cold scream of steel across midnight glass.

it is a dancer's improbable costume it is the flash of blonde in an old instructor's hair it is the ruffle of oil-slick feathers and a purple sneer. _mom_, he whispers, and receives only the imperceptible tinkling of trinkets woven into her helm as a response.

and under it over it around it he hears her take the throne. black silk gives way to red velvet, steel shoes and silver hair and horns that will turn and gouge out the heart of the world. this witch is a minotaur, she is the labyrinth, she is the be-all and the end-all, she is alpha and omega, every whisper of revelation, and her smile is hell in a red smear.

her claws rest above his heart, nails threatening in their sharp angles and violent whiteness. he has just enough time to think _please no_ before she rends it from his chest.

time shatters apart.

.

The war is three years and fifty-nine days gone, and Seifer wakes thinking he is having a heart attack, unable to breathe, to think, the pain all-encompassing in his chest, and even now, even with the power beating in her veins, so loud that he can hear it in the hollow empty silence of their bedroom, Rinoa still calls emergency services.

He sucks oxygen from a plastic mask as they haul him down to a waiting ambulance, and can feel the taunting in her gaze—_ you're weak, boy, weak, you'll always be _

_**weak**_.

The night marches on.

The ocean takes their footprints and drags them away into the sea.

Rinoa throws open the kitchen window upon their return, and inhales the salty air deep enough for both of them.

_You could have died. _

_Yeah, well, I didn't. _

And that is the last they speak of it.

This is the price he pays for her, this is the price he will pay a thousand times over for her. A little dead tissue is nothing between them.


	6. vi

**vi.**

In the halls of the hospital the nurses give her sympathetic looks and offer to do whatever they can to make her comfortable. Because this, because a hard, narrow couch and a stiff blanket, can make up for the ground slipping from beneath her feet.

She sleeps beside him in his bed, and when someone tries to tell her to move she lets her eyes flash amber and they do not bother her much after that.

_Please_.

She stands before a throne, black, leaden, towering above her. _Please_.

_Why?_ A thousand different voices ask and she does not have an answer. She stares up and sees herself seated on the throne, a mantle of feathers heavy around her shoulders.

She is in a garden. She is at the edge of the sea. She is at the beginning and end of time, and everywhere she goes there is the question.

_why?_

She is sixteen and terrified and he is gentle, so gentle, and makes sure to hold her, after. She is eighteen and running, running, running into his arms. She is twenty-one and she wakes with her hands burning with magic and her screams echoing in the room and he doesn't flinch when her touch burns but waits for the screams to subside.

_how dare you ask me why._

She is standing in the dark and there are reflections of herself that stretch out ad infinitum on all sides and Rinoa's screams are the sound of a million pieces of shattering glass.

.

The stars fold in on her in her sleep. She floats in the vastness of space and holds a lazy hand out and shifts a star; now above her, now brought somewhere below. She shuts one eye and pinches her fingers closed around the star and when she opens her hand it is gone, only a black space where a whole universe may once have stood. When she grows bored of this game she closes her eyes and feels their bed beneath her, Seifer's arm thrown lazily across her waist.

.

_rinoarinoarinoarinoa—_

In the distance his voice is panicked and she wants to reach out to him but he's _so far away_, and she is overwhelmed with the pain of a world that is dying around her.

_It hurts, it hurts—they're dying they're— _

She splays her hands in front her and they are claws, and she shrieks and folds in on herself, "not me not me, this body, this, this… help them, help—they won't leave…they will…they will…" She dissolves into sobs and whimpers his name and wonders if there is anywhere left in the world they will be safe.


	7. vii

**vii.**

Time is slipshod around them.

He can glance at her, and memorize the lines of her face, and it will take an eternity. They fight and yell and scream, and it is over and done in the blink of an eye.

She has something to do with it, rearranging the calendar to her whim, dismantling clocks and putting them back together in chaotic order.

rinoarinoarinoarinoa—

Days slide to night slide to midmorning and twilight all at once. He wakes up with the moon hanging heavy in the sky to the sound of her singing her mother's song— at least he thinks it is, the melody is the same but the words come out in fluent Estharian.

She is naked when he finds her, hair wrapping around her like black silk and up to her waist in the water. Seifer is very, very aware of the dark fin cutting a lazy path before her, and when she turns to look at him, music in a foreign tongue still spilling from her lips, the creature disappears, diving deep and away.

He gets her out of the water and into a hot bath and none of the clocks in their apartment read the same time.

Hour upon hour is lost. His fingers weave a clunky braid in the mess of her hair, down past her waist now and the bleached streaks no more than a distant memory. Her song ends.

She curls up obediently in bed with him and he does not sleep at all for fear she'll vanish.

_don't go somewhere i can't follow._


	8. viii

**viii.**

Rinoa walks in other worlds and sees the span of generations with her waking eyes. The shoreline lays in horizontal stripes that separate century from century, and she walks from her own into some past land that sits now at sea, and passes through ancient stories like a ghost. She moves her hand through the aether and pushes forward a pawn on a chessboard, plucks a flower extinct now in Seifer's time, and thinks she will bring it to him so he knows where she has been.

It is dead by the time he finds her and pulls her back.

In her dreams she walks on mountains that curve like a body, and when she reaches what could be the head she finds a lotus pond, and seated in front of it a man, short, tan, and he winks at her and offers her tea.

_you are—_

He grins.

She accepts the small ceramic cup but does not bring it to her lips.

_my daughter. welcome. you are greater than i ever could have dreamed._

The space between her shoulders burns and she feels her pulse in the lines on her face. He is small, so small, and she is everything he used to be.

_i am no one's daughter._

He laughs and Rinoa's wings explode and sweep him away, and she is gone, gone, gone—

.

She comes to in their bed, and Seifer is asleep, upright against the headboard. There is a bottle half-empty on the table beside him, and a magazine in his lap dated sometime in spring, coming on five years since the war.

He looks exhausted.

When she moves he stirs, and reaches for one of her hands before she can slide out of bed.

"Shhhh," she whispers. "You need to sleep." Her voice comes out clear, hers, without the echo of time and all things behind it.

"Please—" his voice is dry and broken, and Rinoa slides closer and pulls him towards her and holds him. She is more alert than she's been in ages and she wills him back to sleep, feels his weight heavy and warm against her, and runs her fingers through his hair.

"My turn," she says. She is killing him, she knows, but it will not happen today.

She stretches her legs and stares around the room. The dim bedside lamp casts shadows on piles of unwashed laundry, and the walls are scarred with magic she doesn't remember casting.

It smells like lotus blossoms, and she hears a man's laughter that echoes in her skull.


	9. ix

**ix. **

She washes blood from his hands, holding palms under warm water that smells like the sea.

He does not remember anything, only that his mouth has the dry copper-rot taste of cheap whiskey and that his knuckles seal shut with a pass of her hand.

It isn't his blood.

Her smile is sweet and pink and hers, freshly cropped hair tumbling past her shoulders in curls and waves, chaos the color of ink. Wasn't it just this morning, that she pulled it all back into a horse's tail and asked him to cleave it off with a butcher knife?

Seifer runs his fingers through a strand of it, and kisses her hard and hot and open-mouthed, tasting lotus on her lips. She begs his name with cold linoleum under her back, and he is not gentle.

Rinoa is not the only one with teeth and claws.

Her pulse beats violence under his lips, and he nips at her throat, leaving a mark on alabaster flesh that never tans, no matter how long she spends searching for the moon underneath the sun. She is killing him, and the only way he will survive is if he kills her first.

.

For the first time in a thousand years, she is herself, her smile bright and her manner playful, the whorls gone from around her eyes as she shimmies her skirt back up over her hips, skin slick and wet through the pale fabric.

Seifer slides his arms around her waist and scoops her up in a dizzying spin.

_What's gotten into you? _

He carries her across the threshold of their house, a little cottage away from any towns. Their apartment is long gone, set fire to in one of her waking dreams and the only explanation he has for their survival is the temporary deafness that comes with being ripped through space and time as she drops them somewhere in Centra.

They stay there.

This is not a love story, and he pretends not to notice when the blue limns her eyes the next morning.


	10. x

**x. **

She pays for the lucid days in spades.

When she falls asleep they have spent the night walking, laughing, chasing each other down the beach, drinking wine straight from the bottle, and they lay sweating and tangled together on the pile of sheets they call a bed.

When she falls asleep she is back at the lotus pond, and Seifer floats in it face down.

_no—_

She runs forward, and _he _is there, just at the edge of the shore.

_please—_

Seifer moves with the gentle rippling of the water and every second is a second too long.

_i just want to talk to you._ His voice is a hiss, a howl, a thousand things with a thousand legs crawling just under her skin. Her shoulders burn again and he holds a hand up to stop her—_not this time_.

_bring him back._

The world shakes and the water with it. Seifer bobs in a taunting rhythm, and Rinoa feels panic taking over. Lightning cracks between her fingers but the man before her does not flinch.

_stay with me. _

_no._

He laughs again and she turns would-be tears to anger, the crawling in her skin to a simmering rage, and lets the whole of her magic (his magic, _your magic, the magic you gave to them, to us, to me_) collect beneath her chest. The bright blue spirals around her eyes radiate just outside her field of vision and she will not show, will never show that she is afraid.

_this is the last time i will ask you to stop._

She raises her hands and he disappears, and she screams when the rush of energy collides with the water and it alights with blue flame. She pulls the magic away bit by bit to the sound of laughter and when she is done Seifer is a shadow beneath the surface, sinking, sinking, sinking—

The bottom of the pond glows now and the body of the man she loves so much is caught between blue and gold.

_stay with me._

_please—_

_you cannot save him without me. _

She feels the twisting inside of her that is the slow severing of the bond between Sorceress and Knight and she knows that he is right.

She nods. The twisting stops, and somewhere she hears the finality of a lock closing between lengths of chain.

.

Seifer wakes her choking and sputtering and gasping for air.

.

"I love you," she tells him, as often as she can.

She says nothing of the dream.


	11. xi

**xi. **

She is drowning by degrees.

Sometimes, he looks at her, and sees nothing but a shimmering facsimile of this woman he professes to love, a cheap replication seen through twisting sheets of rainwater. Seifer runs his hand like a knife through the illusion, pulling it asunder and it is only when she reaches out to cover her hand with his own that he realizes that he's going crazy.

They stay in their little cottage in Centra, and days slip into months into years.

No one cares about them here, no one knows they exist, and she takes to walking along the stretch of abandoned beach with wings unfurled, white feathers turning gray as she lets them trail through the sea.

Cid tracks them down one day, and the conversation is brief and stilted and there is something unholy written in Seifer's expression. His father leaves the long-range radio from his boat and programs it to Garden's frequency, mobile and hovering off the coast of Esthar now.

At two in the morning, Seifer watches Rinoa lay her hand flat on the radio, and smells burnt electronic fire fizzling in the air.

.

He wakes up with water in his lungs and cannot shake the image that he was dead.

{**hhhhhhhhhhhhhhyne**—}

It comes out between blue lips and chattering teeth and it doesn't matter how often Rinoa says that she loves him.

She has been stolen by a god.

.

He sits in the darkness of their bedroom, in the safety nest that is their tangle of sheets and blankets, of pillows stacked haphazardly in a corner, and his hands rest on Rinoa's throat.


	12. xii

**xii.**

She sees all the world at once: as it is, as it was, as it will be. A word tugs at her in howls and hisses, honey sweet, and a bow drawn harshly over strings—

_kompress—_

Her mother runs graceful fingers through hair that falls to her waist and they sit together watching the setting sun, at flame sinking into sea and staining the sky red.

_(mommy i'm scared—_

_shhhh. you're okay. it's just a bad dream.)_

Her mother wears a helm of spiral and horn, clockwork wings stretched behind her, and when she opens her mouth to sing a snake forks out between her teeth—

_kompress_—

She acts on command, burning, flooding, calling forth the storms of myth and legend, punctuated with moments of him—his fingers threaded through hers, nails raking down his spine, quiet whispers she can almost hear—

_i love you_

(do you?)

He is as much a ghost as she, hidden at the edge of the world she slowly burns.

_(i love you)_

She dreams of a noose settling around her neck (_killthewitch_) and wakes up to an empty bed and the sound of steel swinging in the air somewhere down the shore.

.

The man who comes to kill her arrives alone, catches her as she drifts between tomorrows, and she stares past the crisp uniform into hard blue eyes. He shared her bed once, long ago, but she cannot recall his name.

_(rinoa.)_

_who?_

_(come back—)_

His heart slides easily from his chest, and when she drops it beside him she doesn't notice the blood spatter against the ring he wears on his left hand.

.

"Come back—"

He speaks in his sleep and she wants to wake him, to let him know she is _here_, to look at him and see him, see him, to touch him in a way she might remember. She reaches out and stops when she hears the low growl in the corner of the room—

_kompress—_

_(i am no one's daughter.)_

.

She can still taste his skin on her lips when she leaps towards the sea, can smell the blood that rains behind her and pools beside severed wings on the cliff's edge, and the rocks below rise up, up, up to greet her-

_kill_

_the_

_witch._


	13. xiii

**xiii. **

She calls him _Squall_, once, in her not-quite-lucid moments, just once and it isn't until an hour later that he even realizes it. But it doesn't matter.

It has never mattered. You don't forget the one who taught you how to forge the bond.

He dreams of her, of silver hair and raven's mantle, of the jaws that bite and the claws that catch, tearing open the flesh above his heart and withdrawing the organ whole and beating, and he watches Rinoa's face curl up into a shatterheart grin as she closes her fingers around it.

come back.

come back.

Forged steel cuts a screaming arc through the midnight sky, and she is there, standing at the window, fingers pressed against the pane and watching him practice the killing blows.

It's been a long time.

.

He imagines, all too clearly, what her head would look like rolled off of her beautiful shoulders and into the sea, devoured by beasts and her teeth left like pearls under the waves—

come back.

—her skin, the curve of her back, she tastes like lotus blossoms and her kiss promises ruin. he is gentle, she is glass.

come back.

—-_you will like me_

come back, please, rin, don't do this.

his_ i love you _has never carried so much weight before.

she is gone from his arms in the pre-dawn hours, and he follows the path of feathers. her body makes a jagged dance on the rocks; he scrambles to her, slipping against wet stone, gathering her to his chest and begging, begging, _nono no no no n o_—

the seafoam sirens come to collect their debt, and he does not let her go into the darkness alone.

all the tales are true. it feels like going to sleep, and it is dreamless, empty and cold.

.

This is not a love story.

_-fin.- _


End file.
